1. It’s not difficult being a witness at work – people just think it is. People are more afraid of what colleagues will think if they tell them they’re a Christian when in fact apathy is the biggest enemy. Telling people what you’re doing at the weekend (going to church on Sunday) introduces the idea and conversations will develop from there. I used to get raised eyebrows when I told people I taught Sunday School (we call it something else but everyone thinks they know what Sunday school is) – my response was usually ‘yes, if He’ll let me in, you can definitely get in’ type of thing. People will ask questions in their own time out of interest. I have never ever had anyone mock or criticise me when I have mentioned my faith at work.

2. Talking about anything that isn’t shallow is a challenge isn’t it? Try this test: how does your colleague feel about their relationship with their father? Its is rare to talk about serious things (apart from work) with colleagues. Recognising that is a helpful reality check and antidote to guilt.

3. We need to share our lives with our colleagues which means extending friendship/community to them:

Two ideas to initiate this:

i) deliberately take steps to signal that you trust colleagues by being willing to be vulnerable with them. Could be as simple as being more honest in answering bog standard Monday morning questions. Instead of: “My weekend was fine, thanks” maybe “Actually my weekend was crap to be honest. Something happened that upset me and I’d quite like to talk about it…” Could be a game changing conversation. Could also be asking for advice or help with something personal.

ii) Invite a colleague to your home for meal/social time (maybe with some of your Christian friends) rather than socialise at the usual after work bar. Relate to them as friends like any other rather than a sub-class of person who you can’t really get to know beyond work. The Pharisees thought people who didn’t follow their religion contaminated the holy. This was/is nonsense. Christians still need to be better at being willing to welcome non-Christians into their holy huddles (if the non-Christians are willing!).

It may seem counter intuitive to open up like this to non-Christians but it subverts a culture or a way of relating at arms length which is the enemy of gospel conversations.

4. It’s weird that I always think I should talk about God when my life is great and hide the times when life is bad. However, when I wasn’t a Christian it was those going through really tough times saying things like “He can help me through it” that touched me the most.

5. You’re paid to do a job, so the best witness is to do your best you can at your job and keep your integrity. This is the foundation for everything else.

6. Invest time to build genuine relationships but pick the right times. Be real and genuinely interested in people, but also be wise..you’re paid to work and not chat all day so make the most of lunch times and breaks to grab a coffee with colleagues.

7. Keep your eyes open – words aren’t always required. If you spot someone having a bad day, for example, offer to put the kettle on for them even if you don’t know them that well. This can help start a relationship.

7. Remember details as people have shared them with you eg. Partner’s name, children’s names, ages, interests and then try to follow them up in natural conversation.

8. Pray by name for people!

9. Read a Christian book at lunch-time but think carefully about your choice. Pick a title or topic that might open up conversation eg at the time of the Olympics a biography of Eric Liddell.

10. Prepare for Monday morning and the’ interesting weekend?’ questions that might come. Have something curious to say that provokes a response.

11. Be cautious of getting too friendly or personal with someone of the opposite sex. Friendliness on our part because we want to share Christ can, in a non-Christian’s mind, be confused for romantic interest.

In a recent blog post my very good friend John Stevens made some comments about the presence of non-Christians in church services. So for example he writes: We need to face up to the fact that we have to take the gospel to people, and not just invite them to come to where we preach it.

I think to a man we would all a big amen to that. No church can afford to limit its evangelism to a ‘they have to come to us’ rather than a ‘we go to them’ model.

But John goes further than the strategic question of how best to gain the gospel a hearing to state a theological conviction that ‘inviting to church’ is not how we should look, primarily, to do our evangelism. He writes:

This doesn’t seem to be the New Testament model. In the NT, church” is the gathering for committed believers, designed to encourage and edify them. Occasionally an unbeliever might come in amongst them (1 Corinthians 14v24). The gospel is to be taken and proclaimed outside of the church

Andrew Evans has written a thoughtful response raising a number of points that broadly speaking I have sympathy with (John’s reply is also available here).

I want to push a little further so for what it’s worth here is the first of two posts on Why church services need to be the primary focus for our evangelism. I want to make the case that church ought to be the primary place for our evangelism both for the sake of the non-Christian AND for the sake of the Christian. Today I’ll focus on the non-Christian.

For the sake of the non-Christian

Although there are lots of ways in which a non-Christian can here the gospel preached through personal evangelism, enquirer courses, social or evangelistic events, the non-Christian needs to hear the gospel preached to the Christian and for that they need to be in a predominantly Christian environment.

Why do I say that? The same gospel of justification is God’s means of both conversion and transformation. It changes the lives of non-Christians and Christians and the non-Christian is greatly helped towards faith in Christ when they hear something of why and how the gospel is God’s power to not only save but to transform. They grasp how the gospel sets you free from idols of self (money, sex or power) they learn how forgiveness towards another human is possible because the resources for forgiveness are there in the gospel, they grasp how the gospel enables and strengthens marriage as the Christian is challenged from the Bible to love their wives as Christ has loved the church.

No-one has modelled preaching the gospel to Christian and non-Christian at the same time in recent years than Tim Keller. He has demonstrated that an attractional model can work in an extremely secular, hostile environment. It takes a great deal of skill and almost a whole new method of preaching to do this well but it works. New Frontiers, perhaps the fastest growing Reformed church-movement in the UK works almost entirely on this model too and God has greatly blessed their work.

As we teach non-Christians how the gospel of grace saves (justification) so they know exactly what response is required of them but then as we teach Christians how the gospel of grace continues to save (working out salvation in sanctification) so non-Christians grasp the life-changing, transformative power that is in the gospel.

In my experience non-Christians are thinking ‘what difference does the gospel make’, ‘how does it work’, ‘what impact would it have on my life’, as they listen in to preaching aimed at the Christian so they learn in real time and through real experience the answer to their questions.

Secondly, as Francis Schaeffer once said the greatest apologetic is love. Only as a non-Christian enters the Christian community can they see, taste and experience both how Christians love one another and also how loved and welcome they are amongst God’s people. How many non-Christians upon conversion talk of how this dynamic of love and acceptance has struck them as unique to the church?The market-place, or the office water-cooler for that matter, is simply not a place where this dynamic can be experienced.

Thirdly, the unity in diversity of God’s new community is unlike anything we can experience anywhere else. A church full of all sorts of people, across all cultural divides and age and race barriers is a phenomena that is humanly inexplicable. Here is the gospel in glorious technicolour! We need to invite non-Christians to see it for themselves.

I could go on with at least three more reasons but I think this is enough for now.

I’m not surprised that more people are converted at City Church by coming along to our church Sunday by Sunday than by attending A Passion for Life (not that I am anything but an enthusiastic supporter of such initiatives!).

What does this mean for City Church Birmingham?

We expect non-Christians to be present in our services.

We speak as if non-Christians are present

We work very hard in our sermons to speak to both Christian and non-Christian at the same time.

We encourage Christians to simply bring their friends and they do!

One final reflection: I think the attractional model works well amongst younger people in urban contexts than some other settings. I agree with John that it is harder to get people into churches than a generation ago but in a city like Birmingham where 37% of our population is 25 or under, church remains my primary focus for evangelism.

I was converted when a friend had the courage to invite me to go with him to a normal Sunday service and I thank God that he did.

What might just persuade our friends to embrace the gospel of Christ? I guess that depends on what we think is stopping them. Our apologetic (defense) of Christianity largely revovles around answering various questions; Are the gospels reliable, what about other religions, suffering, etc…

But Doug Wilson wonders whether we’ve really understood the nature of unbelief? Can I suggest that next time you chat to a self-confessed atheist why not ask them this question ‘Do you hope that God is there?’ and it might reveal the true nature of the problem. Their answer might well reveal that behind intellectual doubts, at it’s heart unbelief is a heart issue rather than an issue of the head.

Wilson takes us to Romans 1 and reminds us that unbelief is really a suppression of the truth because of a hearts desire to rebel against God and his word. People in some sense don’t believe because they don’t want to believe.

What them should we do? How should our theology drive our apologetic? Doug Wilson asks us to aim at the heart in our apologetics because that is the heart of problem. When the Christian community learns to love God by demonstrating a deep gratitude for all that we have received from him that has persuasive power. From a man who debated Christopher Hitchens on more than one occasion its a helpful reminder. And after all wasn’t it Francis Scaheffer who said ‘the greatest apologetic of all is love’.

The Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (OICCU) invites students across Oxford to take a fresh look at Jesus. Lunch time and evening events led by Mike Cain and Tim Keller. All happening this week. Oxford Town Hall.

Many of us will spend more time with non-Christian family and friends this Christmas time than perhaps at any other time of the year. Some of us are looking forward to finding an opportunity to share our faith but most of us find it an intimidating thought.

My top tips for this Christmas

1. Plan in advance and plan in particular to pray. Decide that God can and might use you in a surprising way this Christmas time. You may doubt that anyone in your family could be interested in the gospel but don’t doubt what God can do.

2. Be wise in how you seek an opportunity to speak. For example it’s often easier to chat 1 to 1 rather than around a meal table as a group. Look to spend a little quality time with different members of family over the time you’re together.

3. Be a consistent witness. Don’t drink or eat too much. Be eager to serve and be helpful.

4. Make church on Christmas day a priority. Unless you’re in a log cabin in the wilderness plan to get to church.

5. Find someone from your church who might be in a similar situation so that you can agree to pray for one another over the festive season and maybe call or text each other a couple of times to encourage and support each other.

6. Give an appropriate evangelistic Christmas book.

7. When speaking think what Christmas means to you as a Christian and try and say something about your own attitudes to Christmas time and what it is that you are choosing to celebrate. Sharing your own experience often opens up conversation as does asking open-ended questions. The question might be different for different members of the family.

Here are a few questions or comments I think could work:

To parents, in-laws, Grand-parents…

How has Christmas changed since you were growing up?

What was Christmas day like when you were a child? Did you have any family traditions? Did you go as a family to church?

To friends

A recent news item might be a good topic eg. Did you hear that David Cameron called Britain a Christian country. I’m not sure I understood what he meant by that do you?

What was Christmas like for you growing up? Would you want to do it differently if you had kids? (have in mind how as a Christian you would want to do things differently eg. how you might try and engage with commercialism etc.)

To younger children

Did you do a school ‘nativity’ this year for Christmas? What did you do in it? Do you know what the story was all about?

If you want to think more about witnessing to family and friends then help is at hand in the form of Randy Newman and his book Bringing the Gospel Home.

I’ve blogged about it a couple of times before here on some ideas to motivate us in our witness to family and here on 8 reasons why it’s so difficult.

How would you know that someone was really afraid to die?

At a superficial level we are tempted to think of it in terms of a fear of the moment of death itself. Perhaps the last few weeks of a terminal disease or the moments on board a plane as it plummets to the ground after a major malfunction. It’s this kind of fear of death that made Woody Allen quip ‘I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’

So when we think of the fear of death we tend to reduce it to the fear of dying. But I’m not sure that does it justice. I want to argue that the fear of death is a much bigger idea that pervades more of life. It’s better expressed in another quote this time of Leo Tolstoy who said

My question – that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide – was the simplest of questions, lying in the soul of every man … a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: ‘What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?’ It can also be expressed thus: Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy.

To the secularist the vague notion that maybe we actually live on in the afterlife has been rejected. So what hope now? Well we find the fear of death at work in surprising ways. In the vain hope that we can continue to be present, if not in reality, then through a computer programme that interacts on Facebook, etc., on our behalf. That, if you like, pretends that we have not gone forever.

So here we find the fear of death expressed in surprising ways as exemplified in this TED talk by Adam Ostrow entitled After your final status update

The fear of death is seen in increasingly desperate attempts to hold onto life. In our unwillingness to leave this life.

How do we respond as Christians?

It’s easy to want to laugh, maybe it all makes us want to cry but surely it reminds us that our message of the one who has defeated death and promised life to all who are in him is a message every human soul is primed to need to hear.

The writer of Ecclesiastes says in chapter 3:10-11

I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart

It is that burden we see expressed in the world and it is that burden that only the gospel answers. Peter in his first letter writes;

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you

Let us then be bold to continue to speak of him who alone has beaten death and conquered the grave. The one who alone has the answer to the fear of death however it might reveal itself.